Published Essays and Pamphlets

Edition limited to two-hundred copies of which fifty are printed
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with the compliments of the publisher

WRITTEN IN RED

Bear it aloft, O roaring flame!
Skyward aloft, where all may see.
Slaves of the world! our cause is the same;
One is the immemorial shame;
One is the struggle, and in One name--
MANHOOD--we battle to set men free.

VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE

THE FIRST TIME I MET HER--THIS MOST GIFTED AND BRILLIANT
ANARCHIST WOMAN AMERICA EVER PRODUCED--was in Philadelphia, in
August 1893. I had come to that city to address the unemployed
during the great crisis of that year, and I was eager to visit
Voltairine of whose exceptional ability as a lecturer I had heard
while in New York. I found her ill in bed, her head packed in
ice, her face drawn with pain. I learned that this experience
repeated itself with Voltairine after her every public
appearance: she would be bed-ridden for days, in constant agony
from some disease of the nervous system which she had developed
in early childhood and which continued to grow worse with the
years. I did not remain long on this first visit, owing to the
evident suffering of my hostess, though she was bravely trying to
hide her pain from me. But fate plays strange pranks. In the
evening of the same day, Voltairine de Cleyre was called upon to
drag her frail, suffering body to a densely packed, stuffy hall,
to speak in my stead. At the request of the New York authorities,
the protectors of law and disorder in Philadelphia captured me as
I was about to enter the Hall and led me off to the Police
Station of the City of Brotherly Love.

The next time I saw Voltairine was at Blackwell's Island
Penitentiary. She had come to New York to deliver her masterly
address, IN DEFENSE OF EMMA GOLDMAN AND FREE SPEECH, and she
visited me in prison. From that time until her end our lives and
work were frequently thrown together, often meeting harmoniously
and sometimes drifting apart, but always with Voltairine standing
out in my eyes as a forceful personality, a brilliant mind, a
fervent idealist, an unflinching fighter, a devoted and loyal
comrade. But her strongest characteristic was her extraordinary
capacity to conquer physical disability--a trait which won for
her the respect even of her enemies and the love and admiration
of her friends. A key to this power in so frail a body is to be
found in Voltairine's illuminating essay, THE DOMINANT IDEA.

"In everything that lives," she writes there, "if one looks
searchingly, is limned to the shadow-line of an idea--an
idea, dead or living, sometimes stronger when dead, with
rigid, unswerving lines that mark the living embodiment with
stern, immobile, cast of the non-living. Daily we move among
these unyielding shadows, less pierceable, more enduring
than granite, with the blackness of ages in them, dominating
living, changing bodies, with dead, unchanging souls. And we
meet also, living souls dominating dying bodies--living
ideas regnant over decay and death. Do not imagine that I
speak of human life alone. The stamp of persistent or of
shifting Will is visible in the grass-blade rooted in its
clod of earth, as in the gossamer web of being that floats
and swims far over our heads in the free world of air."

As an illustration of persistent Will, Voltairine relates the
story of the morning-glory vines that trellised over the window
of her room, and "every-day they blew and curled in the wind,
their white, purple-dashed faces winking at the sun, radiant with
climbing life. Then, all at once, some mischance happened,--some
cut-worm or some mischievous child tore one vine off below, the
finest and most ambitious one, of course. In a few hours, the
leaves hung limp, the sappy stem wilted and began to wither, in a
day it was dead,--all but the top, which still clung longingly to
its support, with bright head lifted. I mourned a little for the
buds that could never open now, and pitied that proud vine whose
work in the world was lost. But the next night there was a storm,
a heavy, driving storm, with beating rain and blinding lightning.
I rose to watch the flashes, and lo! the wonder of the world! In
the blackness of the mid-night, in the fury of wind and rain, the
dead vine had flowered. Five white, moon-faced blossoms blew
gayly round the skeleton vine, shining back triumphant at the red
lightning. . . But every day, for three days, the dead vine
bloomed; and even a week after, when every leaf was dry and brown
. . . one last bud, dwarfed, weak, a very baby of a blossom, but
still white and delicate, with five purple flecks, like those on
the live vine beside it, opened and waved at the stars, and
waited for the early sun. Over death and decay, the Dominant Idea
smiled; the vine was in the world to bloom, to bear white trumpet
blossoms, dashed with purple; and it held its will beyond death."

The Dominant Idea was the Leitmotif throughout Voltairine de
Cleyre's remarkable life. Though she was constantly harassed by
ill-health, which held her body captive and killed her at the
end, the Dominant Idea energized Voltairine to ever greater
intellectual efforts raised her to the supreme heights of an
exalted ideal, and steeled her Will to conquer every handicap and
obstacle in her tortured life. Again and again, in days of
excruciating physical torment, in periods of despair and
spiritual doubt, the Dominant Idea gave wings to the spirit of
this woman--wings to rise above the immediate, to behold a
radiant vision of humanity and to dedicate herself to it with all
the fervor of her intense soul. The suffering and misery that
were hers during the whole of her life we can glimpse from her
writings, particularly in her haunting story, THE SORROWS OF THE
BODY:

"I have never wanted anything more than the wild creatures
have," she relates, "a broad waft of clean air, a day to lie
on the grass at times, with nothing to do but to slip the
blades through my fingers, and look as long as I pleased at
the whole blue arch, and the screens of green and white
between; leave for a month to float and float along the salt
crests and among the foam, or roll with my naked skin over a
clean long stretch of sunshiny sand; food that I liked,
straight from the cool ground, and time to taste its
sweetness, and time to rest after tasting; sleep when it
came, and stillness, that the sleep might leave me when it
would, not sooner . . . This is what I wanted,--this, and
free contact with my fellows . . . not to love and lie, and
be ashamed, but to love and say I love, and be glad of it;
to feel the currents of ten thousand years of passion
flooding me, body to body, as the wild things meet. I have
asked no more.

But I have not received. Over me there sits that pitiless
tyrant, the Soul; and I am nothing. It has driven me to the
city, where the air is fever and fire, and said, 'breathe
this';--I would learn; I cannot learn in the empty fields;
temples are here,--stay.' And when my poor, stifled lungs
have panted till it seemed my chest must burst, the soul has
said, 'I will allow you then, an hour or two; we will ride,
and I will take my book and read meanwhile.'

And when my eyes have cried out the tears of pain for the
brief vision of freedom drifting by, only for leave to look
at the great green [and] blue an hour, after the long, dull-red horror of walls, the soul has said, 'I cannot waste the
time altogether; I must know! read.' And when my ears have
plead for the singing of the crickets and the music of the
night, the soul has answered, 'No, gongs and whistles and
shrieks are unpleasant if you listen; but school yourself to
hearken to the spiritual voice, and it will not matter . . .'

When I have looked upon my kind, and longed to embrace them,
hungered wildly for the press of arms and lips, the soul has
commanded sternly, 'cease, [vile] creature of fleshly lusts!
Eternal reproach! Will you for ever shame me with your
beastliness?'

And I have always yielded, mute, joyless, fettered, I have
trod the world of the soul's choosing . . . Now I am broken
before my time, bloodless, sleepless, breathless,--half
blind, racked at every joint, trembling with every leaf."

Yet though racked and wrecked, her life empty of the music, the
glory of sky and sun, and her body rose in daily revolt against
the tyrannical master, it was Voltairine's soul that conquered--the Dominant Idea which gave her strength to go on and on to the
last.

Voltairine de Cleyre was born in Nov. 17, 1866, in the town of
Leslie, Michigan. Her ancestry on her father's side was French-American, on her mother's Puritan stock. She came to her
revolutionary tendencies by inheritance, both her grand-father
and father having been imbued with the ideas of the Revolution of
1848. But while her grand-father remained true to the early
influences, even in late life helping in the underground railroad
for fugitive slaves, her father, August de Cleyre, who had begun
as a freethinker and Communist, in later life, returned to the
fold of the Catholic Church and became as passionate a devotee of
it, as he had been against it in his younger days. So great had
been his free thought zeal that when his daughter was born he
named her Voltairine, in honor of the revered Voltaire. But when
he recanted, he became obsessed by the notion that his daughter
must become a nun. A contributory factor may also have been the
poverty of the de Cleyres, as the result of which the early years
of little Voltairine were anything but happy. But even in her
childhood she showed little concern in external things, being
almost entirely absorbed in her own fancies. School held a great
fascination for her and when refused admission because of her
extreme youth, she wept bitter tears.

However, she soon had her way, and at the age of twelve she
graduated from the Grammar School with honors and would very
likely have outstripped most women of her time in scholarship and
learning, had not the first great tragedy come into her life, a
tragedy which broke her body and left a lasting scar upon her
soul. She was placed in a monastery, much against the will of her
mother who, as a member of the Presbyterian Church, fought--in
vain--against her husband's decision. At the Convent of Our Lady
of Lake Huron, at Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, began the four-years'
calvary of the future rebel against religious superstition. In
her essay on THE MAKING OF AN ANARCHIST she vividly describes the
terrible ordeal of those years:

"How I pity myself now, when I remember it, poor lonesome
little soul, battling solitary in the murk of religious
superstition, unable to believe and yet in hourly fear of
damnation, hot, savage, and eternal, if I do not instantly
confess and profess; how well I recall the bitter energy
with which I repelled my teacher's enjoinder, when I told
her I did not wish to apologize for an adjudged fault as I
could not see that I had been wrong and would not feel my
words. 'It is not necessary,' said she, 'that we should feel
what we say, but it is always necessary that we obey our
superiors.' 'I will not lie,' I answered hotly, and at the
same time trembled, lest my disobedience had finally
consigned me to torment . . . it had been like the Valley of
the Shadow of Death, and there are white scars on my soul,
where ignorance and superstition burnt me with their hell
fire in those stifling days. Am I blasphemous? It is their
word, not mine. Beside that battle of my young days all
others have been easy, for whatever was without, within my
own Will was supreme. It has owed no allegiance, and never
shall; it has moved steadily in one direction, the knowledge
and the assertion of its own liberty, with all the
responsibility falling thereon."

Her endurance at an end, Voltairine made an attempt to escape
from the hateful place. She crossed the river to Port Huron and
tramped seventeen miles, but her home was still far away. Hungry
and exhausted, she had to turn back to seek refuge in a house of
an acquaintance of the family. These sent for her father who took
the girl back to the Convent.

Voltairine never spoke of the penance meted out to her, but it
must have been harrowing, because as a result of her monastic
life her health broke down completely when she had hardly reached
the age of sixteen. But she remained in the Convent school to
finish her studies: rigid self-discipline and perseverance, which
so strongly characterised her personality, were already dominant
in Voltairine's girlhood. But when she finally graduated from her
ghastly prison, she was changed not only physically, but
spiritually as well. "I struggled my way out at last," she
writes, "and was a free-thinker when I left the institution,
though I had never seen a book or heard a word to help me in my
loneliness."

Once out of her living tomb she buried her false god. In her fine
poem, THE BURIAL OF MY DEAD PAST, she sings:

"And now, Humanity, I turn to you;
I consecrate my service to the world!
Perish the old love, welcome to the new--
Broad as the space-aisles where the stars are whirled!"

Hungrily she devoted herself to the study of free-thought
literature, her alert mind absorbing everything with ease.
Presently she joined the secular movement and became one of its
outstanding figures. Her lectures, always carefully prepared,
(Voltairine scorned extemporaneous speaking) were richly studded
with original thought and were brilliant in form and
presentation. Her address on Thomas Paine, for instance, excelled
similar efforts of Robert Ingersoll in all his flowery oratory.

During a Paine memorial convention, in some town in Pennsylvania,
Voltairine de Cleyre chanced to hear Clarence Darrow on
Socialism. It was the first time the economic side of life and
the Socialist scheme of a future society were presented to her.
That there is injustice in the world she knew, of course, from
her own experience. But here was one who could analyse in such
masterly manner the causes of economic slavery, with all its
degrading effects upon the masses; moreover, one who could also
clearly delineate a definite plan of reconstruction. Darrow's
lecture was manna to the spiritually famished young girl. "I ran
to it" she wrote later, "as one who has been turning about in
darkness runs to the light, I smile now at how quickly I adopted
the label 'Socialism' and how quickly I casted aside."

She cast it aside, because she realised how little she knew of
the historic and economic back-ground of Socialism. Her
intellectual integrity led her to stop lecturing on the subject
and to begin delving into the mysteries of sociology and
political economy. But, as the earnest study of Socialism
inevitably brings one to the more advanced ideas of Anarchism,
Voltairine's inherent love of liberty could not make peace with
State-ridden notions of Socialism. She discovered, she wrote at
this time, that "Liberty is not the daughter but the mother of
order."

During a period of several years she believed to have found an
answer to her quest for liberty in the Individualist-Anarchist
school represented by Benjamin R. Tucker's publication Liberty,
and the works of Proudhon, Herbert Spencer, and other social
thinkers. But later she dropped all economic labels, calling
herself simply an Anarchist, because she felt that "Liberty and
experiment alone can determine the best economic forms of
Society."

The first impulse towards Anarchism was awakened in Voltairine de
Cleyre by the tragic event in Chicago, on the 11th of November,
1887. In sending the Anarchists to the gallows, the State of
Illinois stupidly boasted that it had also killed the ideal for
which the men died. What a senseless mistake, constantly repeated
by those who sit on the thrones of the mighty! The bodies of
Parsons, Spies, Fisher, Engel and Lingg were barely cold when
already new life was born to proclaim their ideals.

Voltairine, like the majority of the people of America, poisoned
by the perversion of facts in the press of the time, at first
joined in the cry, "They ought to be hanged!" But hers was a
searching mind, not of the kind that could long be content with
mere surface appearances. She soon came to regret her haste. In
her first address, on the occasion of the anniversary of the 11th
of November 1887, Voltairine, always scrupulously honest with
herself, publicly declared how deeply she regretted having joined
in the cry of "They ought to be hanged!" which, coming from one
who at that time no longer believed in capital punishment, seemed
doubly cruel.

"For that ignorant, outrageous, blood-thirsty sentence I
shall never forgive myself," she said, "though I know the
dead men would have forgiven me. But my own voice, as it
sounded that night, will sound so in my ears till I die,--a
bitter reproach and shame."

Out of the heroic death in Chicago a heroic life emerged, a life
consecrated to the ideas for which the men were put to death.
From that day until her end, Voltairine de Cleyre used her
powerful pen and her great mastery of speech in behalf of the
ideal which had come to mean to her the only raison d'ˆtre of her
life.

Voltairine de Cleyre was unusually gifted: as poet, writer,
lecturer and linguist, she could have easily gained for herself a
high position in her country and the renown it implies. But she
was not one to market her talents for the flesh-pots of Egypt.
She would not even accept the simplest comforts from her
activities in the various social movements she had devoted
herself to during her life. She insisted on arranging her life
consistently with her ideas, on living among the people whom she
sought to teach and inspire with human worth, with a passionate
longing for freedom and a strength to strive for it. This
revolutionary vestal lived as the poorest of the poor, amongst
dreary and wretched surroundings, taxing her body to the utmost,
ignoring externals, sustained only by the Dominant Idea which led
her on.

As a teacher of languages in the ghettoes of Philadelphia, New
York and Chicago, Voltairine eked out a miserable existence, yet
out of her meagre earnings she supported her mother, managed to
buy a piano on the installment plan (she loved music passionately
and was an artist of no small measure) and to help others more
able physically than she was. How she ever did it not even her
nearest friends could explain. Neither could anyone fathom the
miracle of energy which enabled her, in spite of a weakened
condition and constant physical torture, to give lessons for 14
hours, seven days of the week, contribute to numerous magazines
and papers, write poetry and sketches, prepare and deliver
lectures which for lucidity and beauty were master-pieces. A
short tour through England and Scotland in 1897, was the only
relief from her daily drudgery. It is certain that she could not
have survived such an ordeal for so many years but for the
Dominant Idea that steeled her persistent Will.

In 1902, a demented youth who had once been Voltairine's pupil
and who somehow developed the peculiar aberration that she was an
anti-Semite (she who had devoted most of her life to the
education of Jews!) waylaid her while she was returning from a
music lesson. As she approached him, unaware of impending danger,
he fired several bullets into her body. Voltairine's life was
saved, but the effects of the shock and her wounds marked the
beginning of a frightful physical purgatory. She became afflicted
with a maddening, ever-present din in her ears. She used to say
that the most awful noises in New York were harmony compared to
the deafening pounding in her ears. Advised by her physicians
that a change of climate might help her, she went to Norway. She
returned apparently improved, but not for long. Illness led her
from hospital to hospital, involving several operations, without
bringing relief. It must have been in one of these moments of
despair that Voltairine de Cleyre contemplated suicide. Among her
letters, a young friend of hers in Chicago found, long after her
death, a short note in Voltairine's hand-writing, addressed to no
one in particular, containing the desperate resolve:

"I am going to do tonight that which I have always intended
to do should those circumstances arise which have now arisen
in my life. I grieve only that in my spiritual weakness I
failed to act on my personal convictions long ago, and
allowed myself to be advised, and misadvised by others. It
would have saved me a year of unintermittant suffering and
my friends a burden which, however kindly they have borne
it, was still a useless one.

In accordance with my beliefs concerning life and its
objects, I hold it to be the simple duty of anyone afflicted
with an incurable disease to cut his agonies short. Had any
of my physicians told me when I asked them the truth of the
matter, a long and hopeless tragedy might have been saved.
But, obeying what they call 'medical ethics,' they chose to
promise the impossible (recovery), in order to keep me on
the rack of life. Such action let them account for
themselves, for I hold it to be one of the chief crimes of
the medical profession that they tell these lies.

That no one be unjustly charged, I wish it understood that
my disease is chronic catarrh of the head, afflicting my
ears with incessant sound for a year past. It has nothing
whatever to do with the shooting of two years ago, and no
one is in any way to blame.

I wish my body to be given to the Hahnemann College to be
used for dissection; I hope Dr. H. L. Northrop will take it
in charge. I want no ceremonies, nor speeches over it. I
die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no
allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly. Though I sorrow
for the work I wished to do, which time and loss of health
prevented, I am glad I lived no useless life (save this one
last year) and hope that the work I did will live and grow
with my pupils' lives and by them be passed on to others,
even as I passed on what I had received.
If my comrades wish to do aught for my memory, let them
print my poems, the MSS. of which is in possession of N. N.,
to whom I leave this last task of carrying out my few
wishes.

My dying thoughts are on the vision of a free world, without
poverty and its pain, ever ascending to sublimer knowledge.

VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE"

There is no indication anywhere, why Voltairine, usually so
determined, failed to carry out her intention. No doubt it was
again the Dominant Idea; her Will to life was too strong.

In the note revealing her decision of ending her life, Voltairine
asserts that her malady had nothing to do with the shooting which
occured two years prior. She was moved to exonerate her assailant
by her boundless human compassion, as she was moved by it, when
she appealed to her comrades for funds to help the youth and when
she refused to have him prosecuted by "due process of law." She
knew better than the judges the cause and effect of crime and
punishment. And she knew that in any event the boy was
irresponsible. But the chariot of law rolled on. The assailant
was sentenced to seven years prison, where soon he lost his mind
altogether, dying in an insane asylum two years later.
Voltairine's attitude towards criminals and her view of the
barbarous futility of punishment are incorporated in her
brilliant treatise on CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. After a penetrating
analysis of the causes of crime, she asked:

"Have you ever watched it coming in,--the sea? When the wind
comes roaring out of the mist and a great bellowing thunders
up from the water? Have you watched the white lions chasing
each other towards the walls, and leaping up with foaming
anger, as they strike, and turn and chase each other along
the black bars of their cage in rage to devour each other?
And tear back? And leap in again? Have you ever wondered in
the midst of it all, which particular drops of water would
strike the wall? If one could know all the facts one might
calculate even that. But who can know them all? Of one thing
only we are sure; some must strike it.

They are the criminals, those drops of water pitching
against that silly wall and broken. Just why it was those
particular ones we cannot know; but some had to go. Do not
curse them; you have cursed them enough . . ." She closes
her wonderful expos‚ of criminology with this appeal: "Let
us have done with this savage idea of punishment, which is
without wisdom. Let us work for the freedom of man from the
oppression which makes criminals, and for the enlightened
treatment of the sick."

Voltairine de Cleyre began her public career as a pacifist, and
for many years she sternly set her face against revolutionary
methods. But the events in Europe during the latter years of her
life, the Russian Revolution of 1905, the rapid development of
Capitalism in her own country, with all its resultant cruelty,
violence and injustice, and particularly the Mexican Revolution
changed her view of methods. As always when, after an inner
struggle, Voltairine saw cause for change, her large nature would
compel her to admit error freely and bravely stand up for the
new. She did so in her able essays on DIRECT ACTION and THE
MEXICAN REVOLUTION. She did more; she fervently took up the fight
of the Mexican people who threw off their yoke; she wrote, she
lectured, she collected funds for the Mexican cause. She even
grew impatient with some of her comrades because they saw in the
events across the American border only one phase of the social
struggle and not the all-absorbing issue to which everything else
should be subordinated. I was among the severely criticised and
so was Mother Earth, a magazine I published. But I had often been
censured by Voltairine for my "waste" of effort to reach the
American intelligentzia rather than to consecrate all my efforts
to the workers, as she did so ardently. But, knowing her deep
sincerity, the religious zeal which stamped everything she did,
no one minded her censorship: we went on loving and admiring her
just the same. How deeply she felt the wrongs of Mexico can best
be seen from the fact that she began to study Spanish and had
actually planned to go to Mexico to live and work among the Yaqui
Indians and to become an active force in the Revolution.
In 1910, Voltairine de Cleyre moved from Philadelphia to Chicago,
where she again took up teaching of immigrants; at the same time
she lectured, worked on a history of the so-called Haymarket
Riot, translated from French the life of Louise Michel, the
priestess of pity and vengeance, as W. T. Stead had named the
French Anarchist, and other works dealing with Anarchism by
foreign writers. Constantly in the throes of her terrible
affliction, she knew but too well that the disease would speedily
bring her to the grave. But she endured her pain stoically,
without letting her friends know the inroads her illness was
making upon her constitution. Bravely she fought for life with
infinite patience and pains, but in vain. The infection gradually
penetrated deeper and, finally, there developed a mastoid which
necessitated an immediate operation. She might have recovered
from it had not the poison spread to the brain. The first
operation impaired her memory; she could recollect no names, even
of the closest friends who watched over her. It was reasonably
certain that a second operation, if she could have survived it,
would have left her without the capacity for speech. Soon grim
Death made all scientific experiment on the much-tortured body of
Voltairine de Cleyre unnecessary. She died on June 6th, 1912. In
Waldheim cemetery, near the grave of the Chicago Anarchists, lies
at rest Voltairine de Cleyre, and every year large masses journey
there to pay homage to the memory of America's first Anarchist
martyrs, and they lovingly remember Voltairine de Cleyre.

The bare physical facts in the life of this unique woman are not
difficult to record. But they are not enough to clarify the
traits that combined in her character, the contradictions in her
soul, the emotional tragedies in her life. For, unlike other
great social rebels, Voltairine's public career was not very rich
in events. True, she had some conflicts with the powers that be,
she was forcibly removed from the platform on several occasions,
she was arrested and tried on others, but never convicted. On the
whole, her activities went on comparatively smoothly and
undisturbed. Her struggles were of psychologic nature, her bitter
disappointments having their roots in her own strange being. To
understand the tragedy of her life, one must try to trace its
inherent causes.
Voltairine herself has given us the key to her nature and inner
conflicts. In several of her essays and, specifically, in her
autobiographical sketches. In THE MAKING OF AN ANARCHIST we
learn, for instance, that if she were to attempt to explain her
Anarchism by the ancestral vein of rebellion, she would be, even
though at bottom convictions are temperamental, "a bewildering
error in logic; for, by early influences and education I should
have been a nun, and spent my life glorifying Authority in its
most concentrated form."

There is no doubt that the years in the Convent had not only
undermined her physique but had also a lasting effect upon her
spirit; they killed the mainsprings of joy and of gaiety in her.
Yet there must have been an inherent tendency to asceticism,
because even four years in the living tomb could not have laid
such a crushing hand upon her entire life. Her whole nature was
that of an ascetic. Her approach to life and ideals was that of
the old-time saints who flagellated their bodies and tortured
their souls for the glory of God. Figuratively speaking,
Voltairine also flagellated herself, as if in penance for our
Social Sins; her poor body was covered with ungainly clothes and
she denied herself even the simplest joys, not only because of
lack of means, but because to do otherwise would have been
against her principles.

Every social and ethical movement had had its ascetics, of
course, the difference between them and Voltairine was that they
worshipped no other gods and had no need of any, excepting their
particular ideal. Not so Voltairine. With all her devotion to her
social ideals, she had another god--the god of Beauty. Her life
was a ceaseless struggle between the two; the ascetic
determinedly stifling her longing for beauty, but the poet in her
as determinedly yearning for it, worshipping it in utter
abandonment, only to be dragged back by the ascetic to the other
deity, her social ideal, her devotion to humanity. It was not
given to Voltairine to combine them both; hence the inner
lacerating struggle.

Nature has been very generous towards Voltairine, endowing her
with a singularly brilliant mind, with a rich and sensitive soul.
But physical beauty and feminine attraction were witheld from
her, their lack made more apparent by ill-health and her
abhorrence of artifice. No one felt this more poignantly than she
did herself. Anguish over her lack of physical charm speak in her
hauntingly autobiographic sketch, THE REWARD OF AN APOSTATE:

". . . Oh, that my god will none of me! That is an old
sorrow! My god was Beauty, and I am all unbeautiful, and
ever was. There is no grace in these harsh limbs of mine,
nor was at any time. I, to whom the glory of a lit eye was
as the shining of stars in a deep well, have only dull and
faded eyes, and always had; the chiselled lip and chin
whereover runs the radiance of life in bubbling gleams, the
cup of living wine was never mine to taste or kiss. I am
earth-colored and for my own ugliness sit in the shadows,
that the sunlight may not see me, nor the beloved of my god.
But, once, in my hidden corner, behind a curtain of shadows,
I blinked at the glory of the world, and had such joy of it
as only the ugly know, sitting silent and worshipping,
forgetting themselves and forgotten. Here in my brain it
glowed, the shimmering of the dying sun upon the shore, the
long [gold] line between the sand and sea, where the sliding
foam caught fire and burned to death . . .

Here in my brain, my silent unrevealing brain, were the eyes
I loved, the lips I dared not kiss, the sculptured head and
tendrilled hair. They were here always in my wonder-house,
my house of Beauty. The temple of my god. I shut the door on
common life and worshipped here. And no bright, living,
flying thing in whose body beauty dwells as guest can guess
the ecstatic joy of a brown, silent creature, a toad-thing,
squatting on the shadowed ground, self-blotted, motionless,
thrilling with the presence of All-Beauty, though it has no
part therein."

This is complemented by a description of her other god, the god
of physical strength, the maker and breaker of things, the re-moulder of the world. Now she followed him and would have run
abreast because she loved him so,--

"not with that still ecstacy of [flooding] joy wherewith my
own god filled me of old, but with impetuous, eager fires,
that burned and beat through all the blood-threads of me. 'I
love you, love me back,' I cried, and would have flung
myself upon his neck. Then he turned on me with a ruthless
blow; and fled away over the world, leaving me crippled,
stricken, powerless, a fierce pain driving through my veins--gusts of pain!--and I crept back into my [old] cavern,
stumbling, blind and deaf, only for the haunting vision of
my shame and the rushing sound of fevered blood . . ."

I quoted at length because this sketch is symbolic of
Voltairine's emotional tragedies and singularly self-revealing of
the struggles silently fought against the fates that gave her so
little of what she craved most. Yet, Voltairine had her own
peculiar charm which showed itself most pleasingly when she was
roused over some wrong, or when her pale face lit up with the
inner fire of her ideal. But the men who came into her life
rarely felt it; they were too overawed by her intellectual
superiority, which held them for a time. But the famished soul of
Voltairine de Cleyre craved for more than mere admiration which
the men had either not the capacity or the grace to give. Each in
his own way "turned on her with a ruthless blow," and left her
desolate, solitary, heart-hungry.

Voltairine's emotional defeat is not an exceptional case; it is
the tragedy of many intellectual women. Physical attraction
always has been, and no doubt always will be, a decisive factor
in the love-life of two persons. Sex-relationship among modern
peoples has certainly lost much of its former crudeness and
vulgarity. Yet it remains a fact today, as it has been for ages,
that men are chiefly attracted not by a woman's brain or talents,
but by her physical charm. That does not necessarily imply that
they prefer woman to be stupid. It does imply, however, most men
prefer beauty to brains, perhaps because in true male fashion
they flatter themselves that they have no need of the former in
their own physical make-up and that they have sufficient of the
latter not to seek for it in their wives. At any rate, therein
has been the tragedy of many intellectual women.

There was one man in Voltairine's life who cherished her for the
beauty of her spirit and the quality of her mind, and who
remained a vital force in her life until his own sad end. This
man was Dyer D. Lum, the comrade of Albert Parsons and his co-editor on
The Alarm--the Anarchist paper published in Chicago
before the death of Parsons. How much their friendship meant to
Voltairine we learn from her beautiful tribute to Dyer D. Lum in
her poem IN MEMORIAM from which I quote the last stanza:

"Oh, Life, I love you for the love of him
Who showed me all your glory and your pain!
'Into Nirvana'--so the deep tones sing--
And there--and there--we shall--be--one--again."

Measured by the ordinary yard-stick, Voltairine de Cleyre was
anything but normal in her feelings and reactions. Fortunately,
the great of the world cannot be weighed in numbers and scales;
their worth lies in the meaning and purpose they give to
existence, and Voltairine has undoubtedly enriched life with
meaning and given sublime idealism as its purpose. But, as a
study of human complexities she offers rich material.
The woman who consecrated herself to the service of the
submerged, actually experiencing poignant agony at the sight of
suffering, whether of children or dumb animals (she was obsessed
by love for the latter and would give shelter and nourishment to
every stray cat and dog, even to the extent of breaking with a
friend because she objected to her cats invading every corner of
the house), the woman who loved her mother devotedly, maintaining
her at the cost of her own needs,--this generous comrade whose
heart went out to all who were in pain or sorrow, was almost
entirely lacking in the mother instinct. Perhaps it never had a
chance to assert itself in an atmosphere of freedom and harmony.
The one child she brought into the world had not been wanted.
Voltairine was deathly ill the whole period of pregnancy, the
birth of her child nearly costing the mother's life. Her
situation was aggravated by the serious rift that took place at
this time in her relationship with the father of this child. The
stifling Puritan atmosphere in which the two lived did not serve
to improve matters. All of it resulted in the little one being
frequently changed from place to place and later even used by the
father as a bait to compel Voltairine to return to him.
Subsequently, deprived of opportunity to see her child, kept in
ignorance even of its whereabouts, she gradually grew away from
him. Many years passed before she saw the boy again and he was
then seventeen years of age. Her efforts to improve his much-neglected education met with failure. They were strangers to each
other. Quite naturally perhaps, her male child felt like most men
in her life; he, too, was overawed by her intellect, repelled by
her austere mode of living. He went his way. He is today
probably, one of the 100% Americans, commonplace and dull.

Yet Voltairine de Cleyre loved youth and understood it as few
grown people do. Characteristically, she wrote to a young friend
who was deaf and with whom it was difficult to converse orally:

"Why do you say you are drifting farther and farther from
those dear to you? I do not think your experience in that
respect is due to your deafness; but to the swell of life in
you. All young creatures feel the time come when a new surge
of life overcomes them, drives them onward, they know not
where. And they lose hold on the cradles of life, and
parental love, and they almost suffocate with the pressure
of forces in themselves. And even if they hear they feel so
vague, restless, looking for some definite thing to come.

It seems to you it is your deafness; but while that is a
terrible thing, you mustn't think it would solve the problem
of loneliness if you could hear. I know how your soul must
fight against the inevitability of your deprivation; I, too,
could never be satisfied and resigned to the 'inevitable.' I
fought it when there was no use and no hope. But the main
cause of loneliness is, as I say, the surge of life, which
in time will find its own expression.

Full well she knew "the surge of life," and the tragedy of vain
seeking for an outlet, for in her it had been suppressed so long
that she was rarely able to give vent to it, except in her
writings. She dreaded "company" and crowds, though she was at
home on the platform; proximity she shrank from. Her reserve and
isolation, her inability to break through the wall raised by
years of silence in the Convent and years of illness are
disclosed in a letter to her young correspondent:

"Most of the time I shrink away from people and talk--especially talk. With the exception of a few--a very few
people, I hate to sit in people's company. You see I have
(for a number of reasons I cannot explain to anybody) had to
go away from the home and friends where I lived for twenty
years. And no matter how good other people are to me, I
never feel at home anywhere. I feel like a lost or wandering
creature that has no place, and cannot find anything to be
at home with. And that's why I don't talk much to you, nor
to others (excepting the two or three that I knew in the
east). I am always far away. I cannot help it. I am too old
to learn to like new corners. Even at home I never talked
much, with but one or two persons. I'm sorry. It's not
because I want to be morose, but I can't bear company.
Haven't you noticed that I never like to sit at table when
there are strangers? And it gets worse all the time. Don't
mind it."

Only on rare occasions could Voltairine de Cleyre freely
communicate herself, give out of her rich soul to those who loved
and understood her. She was a keen observer of man and his ways,
quickly detecting sham and able to separate the wheat from the
chaff. Her comments on such occasions were full of penetration,
interspersed with a quiet, rippling humor. She used to tell an
interesting anecdote about some detectives who had come to arrest
her. It was in 1907, in Philadelphia, when the guardians of law
descended upon her home. They were much surprised to find that
Voltairine did not look like the traditional newspaper Anarchist.
They seemed sorry to arrest her, but "them's orders," they
apologetically declared. They made a search of her apartment,
scattering her papers and books and, finally, discovering a copy
of her revolutionary poems entitled: THE WORM TURNS. With
contempt they threw it aside. "Hell, it's only about worms," they
remarked.

They were rare moments when Voltairine could overcome her shyness
and reserve, and really feel at home with a few selected friends.
Ordinarily, her natural disposition, aggravated by constant
physical pain, and the deafening roar in her ears, made her
taciturn and extremely uncommunicative. She was sombre, the woes
of the world weighing heavily upon her. She saw life mostly in
greys and blacks and painted it accordingly. It is this which
prevented Voltairine from becoming one of the greatest writers of
her time.

But no one who can appreciate literary quality and musical prose
will deny Voltairine de Cleyre's greatness after reading the
stories and sketches already mentioned and the others contained
in her collected works.* Particularly, her CHAIN GANG,
picturing the negro convicts slaving on the highways of the south, is for
beauty of style, feeling and descriptive power, a literary gem
that has few equals in English literature. Her essays are most
forceful, of extreme clarity of thought and original expression.
And even her poems, though somewhat old-fashioned in form, rank
higher than much that now passes for poetry.

However, Voltairine did not believe in "art for art's sake." To
her art was the means and the vehicle to voice life in its ebb
and flow, in all its stern aspects for those who toil and suffer,
who dream of freedom and dedicate their lives to its achievement.
Yet more significant than her art was Voltairine de Cleyre's life
itself, a supreme heroism moved and urged on by her ever-present
Dominant Idea.

The prophet is alien in his own land. Most alien is the American
prophet. Ask any 100-percenter what he knows of the truly great
men and women of his country, the superior souls that give life
inspiration and beauty, the teachers of new values. He will not
be able to name them. How, then, should he know of the wonderful
spirit that was born in some obscure town in the State of
Michigan, and who lived in poverty all her life, but who by sheer
force of will pulled herself out of a living grave, cleared her
mind from the darkness of superstition,--turned her face to the
sun, perceived a great ideal and determinedly carried it to every
corner of her native land? The 100-percenters feel more
comfortable when there is no one to disturb their drabness. But
the few who themselves are souls in pain, who long for breadth
and vision--they need to know about Voltairine de Cleyre. They
need to know that American soil sometimes does bring forth
exquisite plants. Such consciousness will be encouraging. It is
for them that this sketch is written, for them that Voltairine de
Cleyre, whose body lies in Waldheim, is being spiritually
resurrected--as it were--as the poet-rebel, the liberty-loving
artist, the greatest woman-Anarchist of America. But more
graphically than any description of mine, her own words in the
closing chapter of THE MAKING OF AN ANARCHIST express the true
personality of Voltairine de Cleyre:--

"Good-natured satirists often remark that 'the best way to
cure an Anarchist is to give him a fortune.' Substituting
'corrupt' for 'cure,' I would subscribe to this; and
believing myself to be no better than the rest of mortals, I
earnestly hope that as so far it has been my [lot] to work,
and work hard, and for no fortune, so I may continue to the
end; for let me keep the integrity of my soul, with all the
limitations of my material conditions, rather than become
the spine-less and ideal-less creation of material needs. My
reward is that I live with the young; I keep step with my
comrades; I shall die in the harness with my face to the
east--the East and the Light."

*
SELECTED WORKS by Voltairine de Cleyre, published by Mother
Earth Publishing Association, New York, 1914.

__________**__________

HERE CONCLUDES THE ESSAY ON VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE BY EMMA GOLDMAN,
PRINTED FOR THE FIRST TIME FROM AN UNPUBLISHED MS. THE
COMPOSITION WAS HAND-SET WITH THE GARAMOND TYPE; NO PLATES WERE
MADE AS THE PRINTED FORMS WERE DISTRIBUTED.